We just returned from a 12-day sojourn in a campervan through Glacier, Yellowstone and Teton national parks ― it was terrific, trust me; everyone should do it if you can ― and came away with the conclusion North Carolinians and Americans of all backgrounds need to go west to rekindle a profound appreciation for the country in which we have been blessed to live.
Barack Obama was astoundingly wrong when he self-righteously — and unilaterally — declared America “not exceptional.” His revisionist thinking that the whole concept of being an “American” is not an incredibly important and epochal event in human history ― no more important or consequential to human progress than say, being from Portugal or Burma ― is incredibly misguided and dangerous to our entire collective psyche.
Without the unique combination of political philosophy based on individual freedom anchored in Judeo-Christian religious belief and aversion to the concentration of power in any individual’s hands, America would be like almost every other nation and, therefore, “not exceptional” at all.
First of all, it is important to put the uniqueness of the American Experiment into its proper context in the overall timeline of the geology and topography of the three national parks. Glacier National Park was literally carved out of a mountain range by ice packs more than 3,000 feet deep starting about 20,000 years ago. Yellowstone was created by the explosion of a supervolcano more than 640,000 years ago. The Tetons are the “youngest” mountain range in America and are still growing as tectonic plates collide against each other hundreds of miles below the earth’s mantle and cause earthquakes pushing up sheets of rock dating from 2.6 billion years ago.
If seeing and learning about such dramatic and beautiful American geography formed over millennia doesn’t instill a profound sense of humility in a person, they are just not paying attention. Considering the vast amount of time during which humans didn’t even exist should make a person feel pretty puny. Modern man, which has evolved from humanoid Neanderthal creatures who somehow survived the last ice age and crawled out of frozen caves 10,000 years ago, represents a mere blip on Earth’s geological timeline ― if all of our planet’s geological life of 4.8 billion years could be condensed into one modern calendar year, man would be on it for less than one second, possibly even a microsecond or nanosecond.
It is “exceptional” that we humans even exist at all. It takes a certain amount of irrational hubris to think man controls nature when the truth is, that Mother Nature and God have all the controls at their disposal.
For the vast majority of the past 10,000 years, mankind has existed in lives that could be generously described as nasty, brutal and short. We asked one guy if we could buy a pine needle basket from one of the indigenous tribes in Montana. He just laughed and said, “The Piegan Blackfeet native Americans who were here long before any white European settlers dared cross the Atlantic engaged in brutal warfare to protect their traditional hunting grounds. They were not basket-weavers. They were proud warriors.”
If realization of survival of the fittest over these last 100 centuries isn’t enough to convince anyone of the exceptionalism that we are even here to attempt to run a government by the people, for the people and of the people, then not much else will.
But what really capped off a two-week expedition for appreciating the land we say we love was attending the final competition of the season at the Jackson Hole Rodeo. In a packed arena filled with cowboy hats and denim jeans, a young champion female barrel rider came charging into the ring with a 10-foot-tall American flag flying almost straight backward as the announcer recounted the 247-year history of the flag’s people never backing down from a challenge or running from danger.
Tears welled up in both of our eyes. It was at that moment we realized just how unique it is for us to be living in a country in this tiny sliver of history where no one has the authority to tell anyone else what to do, what to say or what to think as long as we practice charity toward others without any malice.
We have to defend and protect this America from those such as Barack Obama and Joe Biden who want to impose their will on the rest of us because of their grossly misguided understanding of how the world works. It would be a shame to see the American democratic republic experiment in free self-governance collapse due to our negligence, never to be seen again over the next 4.8 billion years.
